The deadline is right around the corner and you need a video player that’ll knock the socks off your client and make you look like a web designing rock star … Well, here you go!

Great for the beginner

If you’re new to Flash or a web designer who justs needs a simple player – Look no further. This very simple, solid and easy to use player comes with a 7-page long .pdf documentation thoroughly documenting every feature with in-depth explanations or code examples. However, this file is so easy to use, you’ll probably never even need to look at the documentation

Even better for the experienced developer

This component works great as a stand-alone player. It’s easy to set up because all the tweaking is defined as flash vars when you embed the swf in your HTML document. If you’re happy with the default behavior you can even delete them and it’ll elegantly default to a set of fallback values. You’ve got ultimate control and you don’t even have to keep track of an xml file. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Built on best practices OOP as3 programming with interfaces, a solid event structure and effective garbage collection, which makes it easy for you to implement in your own projects. If you are a flash developer looking for a fresh player on your site or in your application. This one will be very easy to implement and extend features on. This is all described in the documentation.

HTML5 Fallback

With the growing need for iDevice support on the web i set the index.html file up with a HTML5 Fallback video player. This will display whenever you view the html file from an iPhone, iPad or some other device without flash support. You can also see this content by disabling JavaScript in your browser. The HTML5 video url and posterframe is defined in the HTML file. Because flash supports .h264 video you can even use the same video for HTML5 fallback and flash.

The iPhone requires some specific encoding for h.264 videos. Look here for more info under the “TV and Video” section.

FeaturesEvery feature and tweak i enabled in this video player is easily accessable via Flash Vars (That’s right, you don’t need tokeep track of any XML files or any other nonsense with this component). No variables what-so-ever need to be defined.They all have fallback values that you can find in the index.html file. Anyway, here’s the list.

- showScreenState – Whether to show a full screen / normal screen button or not.

- showSoundState – Whether to show a mute / unmute button or not.

- smoothing – Whether or not to apply pixel smoothing. This is relevant when scaling.

- deblocking – handles the deblocking filter applied. Read more about what deblocking is here: http://www.adobe.com/livedocs/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Video.html#deblocking. The default value is 0, which means that deblocking is applied as needed.

- scaleMode – Controls how the video is scaled to fit the width and height. Scale modes are a direct implementation of the scale modes used by the Greensock framework, so any scalemodes used by the greensock loading system is supported. Basically you able to scale the video in any fashion you’d need. You can read about the various scale modes here: http://www.greensock.com/as/docs/tween/com/greensock/layout/ScaleMode.html “proportionalInside”, “proportionalOutside”, “widthOnly”, “heightOnly”, “stretch” and “none” are recognized values.

- bgColor – If the video’s scale mode is set to proportional inside, bars will appear either on the top/bottom or left/right sides of the video player so it fits proportionally inside the width/height area. This property defines the color of those bars. The value is a hex color code, where ‘#’ is replaced by ‘0x’ i.e. 0xff0000 is the hex code #ff0000. This is how hex color codes work in ActionScript.

- volume – Volume of the video. A flot-point value between 0 and 1, where 0 is muted, 0.5 is 50% volume and 1 is 100%.

- autoPlay – Whether or not to begin playback automatically.

- repeat – How many times to loop the video. A value of -1 will loop forever.

- url – URL To the video. A default url(“assets/video/example.mp4”) is defined in actionscript. That default value is used if none is defined as a flashvar. The URL can be relative. i.e. if your domain is domain.com and you video is at domain.com/assets/video/2010/example.mp4 you don’t need to type ‘ http://www.domain.com/assets/video/2010/example.mp4’, just type ‘assets/video/2010/example.mp4’.

A solid foundation

Greensock’s loading and tweening frameworksThis player is built on top of the VideoLoader class which is part of Greensock’s LoaderMax framework. TheVideoLoader class is an extremely solid foundation, that has been tested by thousands of developers and is trusted for it’s reliability and brilliant features. It even works around several native ActionScript3 bugs and inconviniences.

LoaderMax is 100% free and available for download at http://www.greensock.com/loadermax/

Supported video formats

This video player supports any formats supported by Flash Player 10. Contrary to popular belief, those formats aren’tlimited to .flv and .f4v. You can also use any container format using h.264, such as: .mp4, .m4a, .mov, .mp4v, .3GP and.3G2.

Updates to this itemFeb. 2011Full Screen and Mute/Unmute buttons

As per request i’ve added a mute / unmute button and a full screen / normal screen button. The buttons are controlled via flashvars, and are per default enabled, meaning you have to set showScreenState and showSoundState to false to disable them. The icons are available in the library of the fla file, should you need to modify them. Ohh, and don’t worry, the mute button is clever enough to initialize in the muted state if you set volume to 0 via the flashvars